Thursday, October 20, 2005

I'm so out of the loop

Why did I not know until today that there was a Kiefer exhibition going on in my hometown?

I'm really looking forward to getting out there as soon as I can. It will be interesting, at the very least. The museum has two Kiefer pieces in its permanant collection that are so virtuosically displayed that it is difficult to divorce the pieces from the rooms in which they are displayed. It's difficult to picture the pieces outside of the rooms, but it is equally as hard to imagine the rooms containing anything else. The piece that is shown when you follow the link is housed in an elliptical room (really) right past the entrance to the main gallery. Opposite the opening to the elliptical room there is a wall with this. It's quite the opening to a museum trip. I have to have gone a couple dozen times in the past year and a half and the experience of walking into that gallery never fails to stun me into silence.

I'm excited because I've seen the two Kiefers here and then one other in a very dissapointing modern art gallery this summer. It will be interesting to see how a mega-dose of Kiefer hits the system, anyway.

The only drawback, of course, is that any time there is a special exhibition, much of the permanant collection gets displaced. One of the greatest strengths of the museum here is its small but very tight collection*. I've often thought that people should not be able to say that they "don't like modern art" until they come to see the museum here. It's hard for me to imagine anyone still thinking that after they see a collection that is as carefully selected and treated with as much care as this one is here in Fort Worth.

*"Small but tight" seems to be the M.O. of all the Fort Worth art museums. We're incredibly small, but top notch in what we have.